


Watch and Learn

by weakinteraction



Category: Marvel 616, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 12:41:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6658114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/pseuds/weakinteraction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And there came a day, a day unlike any other, when Empire State University's 2nd year CS students found themselves united against a lab assignment no single student could withstand.</p><p>(They weren't cheating, though. There are totally mitigating circumstances.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Watch and Learn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Traincat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Traincat/gifts).



Doreen looked at the midterm in front of her -- "Efficient Algorithmic Implementation in Constrained Computing Environments: Timed Computing Lab Practical Test", it said in large, not very friendly letters -- and chewed nervously on the nut in her mouth.

She'd didn't feel at all ready for this, even though she'd spent all morning doing practice exercises with Tomas and Ken, while Nancy sat in the corner of the room, insisting that the furious knitting she was doing was helping her with her stress levels and thus the best way for her to prepare herself.

Apart from the four of them, there were only a dozen or so other students here -- this was an elective with a notorious reputation for being difficult. She had thought it sounded fascinating, and talked the others into signing up with her. Now she just hoped that they didn't blame her too much.

With so few students, Professor Hughes had been able to spread them out among the terminals in the lab with plenty of space between them. She risked a little wave at Nancy, sat diagonally opposite, who smiled back minutely.

Professor Hughes coughed loudly, directly behind her, and Doreen nearly leaped out of her chair.

"You will have three hours to complete the assignment," Professor Hughes read out in a voice steeped in terminal boredom. "You must not communicate with one another at any time. You are reminded of the academic conduct agreement you signed when you enrolled and the penalties thereunder for plagiarism and other forms of cheating. Empire State University--" He coughed, and spoke in his usual sarcastic voice. "Empire State University clearly believes that despite the fact that you must all have gained a high school diploma or equivalent qualification to be allowed to come here, you are somehow incapable of reading the rubric on the assessment for yourself. There must have been a lawsuit or something." He coughed again and resumed the dull monotone. "I'm sorry, I'll read that again. "Empire State University treats all cases of academic malpractice extremely seriously. Are there any questions at this time?"

Doreen could feel the eyes of the rest of the class on her, willing her not to put her hand up. Just because the first time they had done one of these she had asked a perfectly reasonable question about what she should do in the event of an emergency. She had been trying to work out how Squirrel Girl might be able to get to a crisis if Doreen pretended to have received some sort of message, but it had led to an even longer recitation of the procedures for evacuation in the event of fire, superhero fight or alien invasion, _and_ the section of the ESU student handbook on getting special dispensation when an assessment could not be completed for reasons outside a student's control.

"Your time begins... Now."

Doreen opened the booklet and quickly digested the instructions. They had to rewrite some decades-old legacy code that had been designed in the days of RAM being scarce to only require 32 kilobytes. Their version could use as much memory as they wanted, but had to be suitable for low power mobile applications and thus use as few computational steps as possible.

Doreen was secretly relieved at having _something_ to go on; she had been dreading having to invent something completely from scratch. She found the file for the old code where Professor Hughes's instructions said it would be, and got to work trying to puzzle out what it actually did.

The code was a.mishmash of functions that called each other and themselves multiple times, addressing various non-contiguous sections of memory on a bitwise basis; there were nigh-on incomprehensible shifts and bitmasks everywhere, with each variable really having multiple different functions that interacted with each other in strange ways. The purpose of the code was murky at best, and there didn't seem to be any comments -- had Professor Hughes taken them all out, or had they never been there in the first place?

Increasingly desperate, Doreen scrolled well past the end of the code, hoping that somehow whoever had written this had got the memo about the value of embedded documentation. She even made a mental note that if she ever found herself back in time again she might take the time to write such a memo herself.

Nothing, except for a single line comment right at the end:

`// v0.1.1 - y3ll0wj4ck3t`

Doreen gasped. Suddenly the purpose of the code was clear. "Nancy!" she hissed, looking round furtively at the other students. "I know what this code is."

"I don't need help, Doreen, I'll figure it out on my own," Nancy whispered back.

"No, listen, it's an early version of the core subroutines for Ultron!"

"What?" Nancy said. Behind her, Tomas and Ken turned round from their workstations.

This was enough to attract Professor Hughes's attention. "No communication during the test!" he snapped.

"Professor, where did you get this code?"

"Is that relevant?"

"I think so!" Doreen said. "It was written by Hank Pym."

"What?"

"Where did you get it, Professor?"

"There's a... website. For CS lecturers to share resources. It's perfectly legitimate!" He sighed. "This promised to take no time at all to grade."

"I think it was planted there by Ultron," Doreen said. "As a backup gambit in case one or other of his schemes failed. It'll take no time at all to grade because by the time it's over, he'll have taken over."

"Why are all the other students ignoring us?" Ken asked slowly. Doreen looked round and saw that he was right; they were still glued to their terminals just as they had been at the start.

It was Tomas who figured it out. "They're all running the code, with some extra output about its current state. They must have thought that was the easiest way to work out what it did. It must have hypnotised them somehow."

"But I tried that too," said Ken.

"And me," Nancy added.

"Hmm," Doreen said. She looked at Nancy for a moment before turning to Professor Hughes. "Professor, I think we three perfectly normal but somehow unhypnotised students of yours should get out of here now while we still can. But Nancy here will bravely stay behind--" Doreen looked back at Nancy's alarmed expression and pleaded wordlessly with her to go along with it "--and assist you in summoning help. I'm sure there are some awesome superheroes somewhere nearby, I mean, we are in New York."

"Very well," Professor Hughes said. "You had better go. I'll try and shut things down."

Doreen raced out into the corridor with Tomas and Ken. They quickly discussed the situation as they took off their civilian clothes.

"You need to call the New Avengers," Tomas said to Doreen.

"I left my communicator behind!" Doreen said unhappily. "I thought it would be banned, I mean, it's kinda like a cell phone, right?"

"Let's hope everyone else was as scrupulous," Ken said. "If Ultron gets one of the hypnotised students to upload him to the Internet, we're finished."

"OK, we need a plan," Doreen said. "Tomas--"

"Chipmunk Hunk," he said, gesturing at his costume.

"Sorry, sorry! You and the chipmunks find the nearest cell phone masts and disable them."

"What about landline connections? It's only a matter of time..."

"We'll take care of those," Doreen said, then yelled in Squirrelese, "Tippy!"

Tippy-Toe came bounding in from a nearby window. "What do you need, Doreen?"

"Get everyone," Doreen said. "We need to chew through every cable coming out of this building."

"You've got it," Tippy-Toe said and scampered off, her pink ribbon streaming behind her.

"That will still only buy us time," Ken said. "Ultron will adapt. We need to shut off the building's backup power too. There's a stream running past the back; I'll see if the fish and I can divert it into the basement where the generators are."

"We need to evacuate everyone," Tomas said. "It Ultron makes it to other terminals in the building he could hypnotise them too."

Doreen took a nut from her pocket and threw it with full force at the fire alarm point down the hall. The bells began to ring instantly.

Tomas looked impressed, but Ken said, "That won't work on the students who are already hypnotised."

"I'll get them out. Hey, do either of you know any good ways to unhypnotise people?" Tomas and Ken both shrugged. "Never mind, we'll worry about that later. Let's go!"

They both rushed off in opposite directions and Doreen headed back into the lab. "What terrible crisis is under way here?" she asked melodramatically. She turned to Nancy. "Can you explain, good citizen who I have never met before?"

Nancy was typing away furiously on her keyboard, Professor Hughes standing over her shoulder giving advice. She glanced up. "I told him, Doreen."

"What? Which part of 'secret identity' didn't you understand?"

"We don't have time for all the 'oh, Squirrel Girl, thank goodness you're here' bit," Nancy said.

"But that's my favourite part!"

"And we definitely didn't have time to pretend to get help I already knew was coming. Ultron -- or rather, fourteen copies of Ultron -- are trying to find a way out of the local area network," Nancy said. "I'm just about keeping ahead of them with an adaptive algorithm that reassigns IP addresses randomly and uses a spoof DNS server so that they think they're making it on to the Internet."

"Wow," Doreen said.

"Professor O'Grady did say you'd been one of her star students in first year Network Infrastructure," Professor Hughes said. Nancy looked pleased. He turned to Doreen. "I promise not to tell anyone who you are if you won't tell anyone about me lifting my midterm from a murderous rogue AI."

Doreen sighed. "Deal," she said grudgingly. "Now, I'm going to get everyone out of here. Is that allowed?"

"Go for it, Squirrel Girl," Nancy said, her eyes barely leaving the screen and her fingers flying across the keyboard.

* * *

In the time it took Doreen to jump out of the fourth floor window bearing one of her hypnotised fellow students a dozen , Chipmunk Hunk and Koi Boi had completed their parts of the plan and rejoined them. The computer terminals around them were still giving off occasional sparks, but at least all their fellow students were safely outside now. Doreen could see them sat at tables and slumped against trees in the quad, bewildered but (luckily) apparently released from their brief possession by Ultron having been defeated. Poking out of the trees were several squirrels, coordinated by Tippy-Toe, subtly keeping an eye on the victims for any residual effects.

Surveying the devastation around them, Tomas said, "We have failed this assignment so badly."

Doreen came back in, dusting off her hands proudly. "No way, we aced it."

They all looked at her sceptically.

"You'll all get As," Professor Hughes said. "I'd rather fill in the forms about my assessment not differentiating between students properly than the ones about causing widespread damage to university property."

"We defeated Ultron," Tomas said. "That is pretty cool."

"Nancy was the one who came up with the adaptive algorithm to stop him hopping from one machine to another," Doreen said. "I think _she_ defeated Ultron."

Nancy didn't seem to be listening, however. "Doreen," she said, looking out into the corridor. "When Ultron takes on corporeal form, is he ever a giant bald baby in a toga?"

"Don't think so," Doreen said. "That sounds more like-- hey, Uatu, it is you!" as the Watcher rounded the corner. 

Uatu, who had indeed been watching the whole thing, coughed. "I can confirm," he said to no one in particular, "that the Ultron Nancy defeated was the real thing, albeit a crude implementation, and not any sort of copy or duplicate--"

"Dude, not cool!" Doreen interrupted.

Uatu looked at her sternly.

"You're totally minimising Nancy's achievement! Ultron's whole thing is making loads of copies of himself. That's exactly what her adaptive algorithm kept ahead of!"

Uatu sighed. "So what should I say?"

Doreen chewed her lip for a moment before grabbing a nearby notepad and starting to scribble on it. When she was finished, she passed it to the Watcher.

Uatu squinted at it for a moment, then began to read. "I, Uatu the Watcher, can confirm that Nancy Whitehead is an awesome friend and also played a vital role in the defeat of Ultron, preventing the world from being turned into nothing but endless copies of him." He stopped as he saw the next bit, until giving in under the glare Doreen was giving him. "I can further confirm that Nancy Whitehead and Doreen Green are ... BFFs for life?" Doreen nodded enthusiastically at his quizzical look. "And further still, I can confirm that I am right now this very moment inviting Doreen, Nancy, Tomas and Ken to come and ... chill on the Blue Area of the Moon and listen to what if stories. But only cool ones, and definitely not ones with sad endings."


End file.
